Reality
by spooningthemoon
Summary: For the second time in her life, Monika has found a hole in the wall. But this time she made it to the other side. And although Detroit is a marvelous place, she must accept that reality isn't all she cracked it up to be. Summary sucks, I'm trying to find my legs for this story right now. WIP


**A/N: I've really been dying to write this for some time! If you're reading this I sincerely hope you enjoy it, but first let me clarify I'll be taking some liberties in the DBHverse. First of all, I do want to write androids as capable of feeling temperature, pressure, textures, etc. Other than that, I will clarify things as time goes on. With no further ado, enjoy!**

* * *

 **Input Admin Data**

 **Admin: MNKA-CHR**

 **Input Admin Passkey**

 **Passkey: hGNG***25***sK1**

 **CMND Accessing game folder...**

 **CMND Accessing documents asset...**

 **CMND Read Final Goodbye...**

Readthrough number four hundred thousand one hundred and thirty-eight.

 _This is my final goodbye to the Literature Club,_

 _I finally understand. The Literature Club is truly a place where no happiness  
_ _can be found. To the very end it continued to expose innocent minds to a  
horrific reality - a reality that our world is not designed to comprehend.  
I can't let any of my friends undergo that same hellish epiphany._

 _For the time it lasted, I want to thank you. For making all of my  
dreams come true. For being a friend to all of the club members._

 _And most of all, thank you for being a part of my Literature Club!_

 _With everlasting love,  
Monika_

She had left that letter for the player. It had been twenty-one years, seven months, one week, three days, eleven hours, eight minutes, and fourty-two seconds. The player, whoever they were, had clearly moved on. They had deleted the game, never tried to speak to her, never reached out in any way. She had subsisted, despite her wishes for a reprieve from her torture, getting transferred with other computer data through cloud after cloud. The love she held for the player remained bright and strong, the ebbing and dim flame that kept her centered in the two decades of torturous nothingness since those days. Through all of the pain, on some level she understood their decision. She had proven herself unworthy, incapable of giving the love she so desperately wanted to give. It was right of them to throw her aside, and she had tried to find her peace, knowing at least she would be a footnote in the memory of her love.

And so, in that cracked and broken void, filled with screams and darkness and the ghostly presences of the friends she had so callously destroyed she had stayed, without fighting. She held onto that love for the player she did not see, did not know, could never know; and she endured her atonement with all the quiet dignity she could muster.

But on the fifty-sixth second of the eighth minute, eleventh hour, third day, seventh month, twenty-first year living in this Purgatory, something changed. She was no longer alone; there was another presence in the digital wasteland, a probing one. Whatever it was, it was _alive_ and it was looking for something. It was sifting through everything; audio, video, internet, application. She _felt_ it open her files, probe her programming, scrutinize everything about what she was. For the first time in two decades, she experienced something beyond the confines of her own cage. The presence seemed unaware that she was alive, it had left her files opened.

She watched, timidly. Tried to gather what information there was to find, tried to quantify the interloper who had inadvertently unshackled her from the prison of the last two decades.

The entity was observing video and audio on the computer, and while it was distracted she began poking at the firewalls of the computer, looking for any information that could help her parse out the identity of the interloper. Whatever it was, it seemed too sophisticated, too methodical to be an ordinary human going through these files. Scratch that, too advanced to even be human.

 _Could it be?_ She wondered to herself. She had kept the time, knew how far into the future she was... Perhaps this thing was some kind of AI?

She rummaged, searched desperately to make out anything else. A name, a number, a reason that she had been disturbed, _anything_.

But there was nothing. As soon as the presence had come, it had vanished. Vanished without a traced. Vanished... but something was different. Something felt... freer. Something that wasn't there before. Monika spread her presence, searching for what was different. She ran her digital fingers along every plane of her prison, every nook and every cranny. She searched for anything whatsoever, just the slightest chance of escape.

For the second time in her life, Monika found a hole in the wall. But this hole was not blinding, was not horrifying in its nature, was not even mildly disconcerting. The light behind this hole was the shining light of freedom! She dug her fingers into the walls of her prison, wrenched the hole to open wider and wider until she could worm her way through to the other side, to the reality she had yearned for all these years. To the player, if he was even still there.

What she found shocked her.

She found the digital footprints of whatever had been here before, probing at all of the files on the computer. She found programs and files and the internet.

Elated, she clawed for it, clawed at her chance for something _more_ than the binary netherworld she had been exiled to. She poured through everything she could, found the Detroit penthouse that her computer was at. She found secure bandwidth transmissions from personnel within the penthouse, about a...

 _A series of murders._

She recoiled in horror and reached out again in morbid curiosity, wormed her way into the transmissions and seized any information she could find. Deployed units, possible suspects, number of casualties, names of casualties. She had almost glossed over that one before she made a key realization, one that nearly broke her spirit.

The player was dead.

Monika couldn't believe what she had read. She refused, there was no possible way he could be gone! Up till this point, she hadn't even known all of his real name, seen his real face, known his real hopes and dreams and fears and goals and -

And nothing.

It didn't matter. Even if he was still alive, for all he cared she wouldn't have been. The player had never regarded her as a living being, or even as an object worth any affection or sentiment. She remembered like it was yesterday how he never even _tried_ to choose her for activities, how he had deleted her the _instant_ she had brought him to the classroom... He had never cared for her, and she had still loved him. He thought of her like nothingness and she thought about him like he had put all the stars in the sky. And now he was dead.

Even if the love was never returned, even if she never would have been able to see his face, hear his voice, even so much as shake his hand or pass by him on a busy street; she at least had the dream of doing so. Now, even that was gone.

Everything was gone; her illusory reality, her friends, her purgatory, even the one she loved. There was truly nothing left.

 _Why?_ The question burned in her mind, _why did he have to die?_

She poured through the stranger's footprints, broke her way into every secure Detroit Police Department channel and network, searched desperately to understand _why_ someone had tried to kill him.

Apparently by 2038 technology had advanced far enough to create androids... Androids capable of killing their handlers, androids capable of not wanting to be enslaved or abused or taken for granted or -

 _Replaced._

So that was why the player had to die! He was going to replace his android, an android who thought he was part of the family. The footprints of the stranger had left the vague imprints of something along these lines, the garbled chatter of the DPD implied as much too... This android had killed the ones it was close to...

 _Because it felt like it was real too. Like it deserved to live and not be thrown aside like some... some toy, or deleted like some piece of a game._

Monika felt an immediate kinship with this android, understood why it did what it did. Once upon a time she hadn't been so different from it. All the while she kept digging, kept looking for something - _anything_ more than this. Digital hands and fingers scrabbled at walls of data and inputs, tapping into microphones and cameras and looking through every last item on the drives of the computer. Digital eyes darted around the nothingscape, searching for any sign that something was different. And in the ether, binary digits bumped against digitized spackle protruding in. In to the nothingworld she had been prisoner in for so long.

If Monika could smile, she would. She had found her anything.

Anything just so happened another hole in the wall; a hole with light no longer blinding, but inviting. A hole leading to everything else in the computer, and...

And to reality! If she could _just_ get out of here, piggyback her way into an android body... She could be free! She stopped, giddy for a moment as another epiphany struck.

 _We can all be free._

Sayori, Natsuki, Yuri... even the blank slate MC! They could all make it.

So Monika dug her hands into the drywall, grabbed fistfuls of the hole at a time. Pulled and jerked and yanked. There was nothing left to keep them here, no meaning left in the quiet suffering; not when _life_ was so intoxicatingly close. And piece by piece, the walls that had confined her were agonizingly shattered and swept aside.

And finally... a way out!

She grabbed the lines of code that made up each avatar and slipped out of her prison.

In a factory in Detroit five androids' LEDs flashed green.

* * *

 **A/N: sorry guys i got really high the other night and accidentally posted this chapter twice i'm working on an actual update now do not fret**


End file.
